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Nonnus

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Theophanes Nonnus was a Byzantine physician. For the saint of this name, see Saint Nonnus.
The Greek epic poet Nonnus (Greek Νόννος), a native of Panopolis (Akhmim) in the Egyptian Thebaid, probably lived at the end of the 4th or early 5th century.

He produced the Dionysiaca, an epic tale of the god Dionysus, a paraphrase of the Gospel of John, and two poems which are lost: the Battle of the Giants and the Bassarica.

Works

Nonnus' principal work is the Dionysiaca, an epic in forty-eight books, the main subject of which is the expedition of Dionysus to India and his return. The earlier portions treat the rape of Europa, the battle of Zeus and Typhoeus, and the mythical history of Thebes; it is not until the eighth book that the birth of the god is described. Other poets had already treated the subject, and since the time of Alexander the Great it had gained popularity from the favourite comparison of the king with the god and of his enemies with the giants.

The contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (8th edition, 1888) remarked, "In its vast and formless luxuriance, its beautiful but artificial versification, its delineation of action and passion to the entire neglect of character, the poem resembles the epics of India.... Like his countryman Claudian, Nonnus is a writer of copious learning and still more copious fancy, eminent in in invention, in description and in melody, whose faults may be charged upon his age, while his merits are his own." His chief merit consists in the systematic perfection to which he brought the Homeric hexameter. But the very correctness of the versification renders it monotonous. His influence on the vocabulary of his successors was likewise very considerable."

Also surviving is his paraphrase of the Gospel of John, which is chiefly interesting as indicating that Nonnus apparently converted to Christianity in his later years. The style is not inferior to that of his epic, but since it embellishes further the already embellished narrative of the evangelist, it produces an impression of extreme bombast and want of taste.

At least two other works by Nonnus are lost. Only four lines of the Bassarica (also on the subject of Dionysus) have been preserved in a commentary by Stephanus of Byzantium, and according to an epigram in the Palatine Anthology (ix. 198), Nonnus was the author of a work titled the Battle of the Giants.

Bibliography

  • Editio Princeps (1569)
  • Hermann August Theodor Köchly (Teubner series, with critical introduction and full index of names, 1858)
  • the most generally useful edition is that by the comte de Marcellus (1856), with notes and prolegomena, and a French prose translation.

On the metre,

  • J. G. Hermann, Orphica (1805), p. 690
  • Arthur Ludwich, Beitrage zur Kritik des Nonnus (1873), critical, grammatical and metrical
  • C. Lehrs, Quaestiones epicae (1837), pp. 255-302, chiefly on metrical questions.

On the sources, see

  • R. Kohler, Uber die Dionysiaka des Nonnus (1853), a short and connected analysis of the poem, with a comparison of the earlier and later myths
  • I. Negrisoli, Studio critico ... Nonnus Panopolita, with short bibliography (1903).

The paraphrase on St John (editio princeps, c. 1505) is edited by F. Passow (1834) and A. Scheindler (1881), with complete index.

See also

External links



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